Topic: The Dunning?Kruger Effect

[Ken]

On one of the woodturning forums that I read every day there was a topic about the lack of quality in some of the work that people offer up for sale. One of the members posted a link to the "Dunning?Kruger effect" that talks about how people percieve themselvs and their work... it's good reading. 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Dunning?Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which the unskilled suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.[1]

Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others" (p. 1127).[2]